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Unity-Powered iPhone Games Rejected from iTunes App Store
by Danny Cowan
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November 13, 2009
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A number of iPhone developers report that their Unity-powered applications have failed Apple's approval process, and are denied release in the iTunes App Store.
A thread at the Unity Community forums reveals that these applications have the potential of using non-public APIs accessible via the Unity game authoring tool. The same APIs were allegedly used by iPhone social RPG developer Storm8 to obtain, store, and transmit player phone numbers without prior permission.
Though Storm8 claims that its applications have been updated to remove this functionality, many of the company's games, including iMobsters, World War, and Zombies Live, have since been removed from the App Store and are no longer available for download.
Ravensword: The Fallen King, an open-world RPG to be published by Chillingo, was among the handful of Unity engine games to be denied an App Store release.
Many Unity developers received their rejection notices from Apple earlier this week, despite explaining that the included APIs were not used to harvest phone numbers. Several affected apps included no network functionality at all.
Unity notes in another forum thread that the issue has been addressed, and the next engine update will remove the flagged APIs. Authors of rejected apps will need to resubmit their games to Apple's approval process following the release of the updated engine.
[UPDATE: Unity has also published a weblog post on its official website explaining the problem and the fix.]
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When [the publishing ban] problem emerged we spent day and night working on a fix which is now being sent to iPhone developers who could be hit by this.
The whole thing only took days and only a good handful of apps will be delayed because of this (another 350 or more are still happily live in the App Store).
Games that can make API calls on the iPhone can potentially extract user data – a security issue which Apple is outright refusing to ignore.
iPhone developer Storm8 [which doesn't use Unity], was recently accused of illegally harvesting phone numbers through one of its Apps using such API calls.
As Apple discovered that the Unity engine could potentially make such API calls, it began to refuse the application of certain Unity-developed iPhone games. It is widely regarded that the Unity engine’s potential use of API calls is an innocent mistake.
No problem had ever been raised over these [API calls] (which were used in a completely harmless way of course) for over a year so we thought we were in full compliance.
Now, due to the swift fix issued by Unity, only a handful of developers will be hit by the unfortunate error.
Developers who have been refused approval by Apple will have their game sent to the back of the queue for App Store approval.
The API calls were coming from a piece of library we use so we didn't know, though one could argue we should have.
All that said we are sorry about the whole thing (and those developers whose apps were delayed) but we think this story shows that we are over-the-top dedicated to make sure to support Unity and its users.
For more information on Unity's fix see: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/11/14/unity-iphone-app-store-submissions-problem-s
olved/
We updated all of our applications back in August when some users noted that Storm8 games contained software code that for some users collected mobile phone numbers upon opening the application for our massively multiplayer online role-playing games. However, Storm8 was not using the phone numbers for any purpose, nor did we provide them to any other company. When we were alerted to the issue, we immediately took voluntary, proactive steps to update our games, so current game versions do not download, store or use iPhone telephone numbers when a game is opened.
To view the statement we put out to our users outlining the proactive steps we’ve taken, you can go here: http://forums.storm8.com/showthread.php?t=5849.